The White Gaze, Being-Object, and Intercorporeity: Casting Anew the Ontological Violence of Racism

The language of objecthood is often invoked in critical race and postcolonial discourse, and for good reason: it expresses the profound dispossession and desubjectification in the lived experience of racism. Analyses of the racist gaze in Fanon and the anti-Semitic gaze in Sartre, for example, show how racialized bodies are reduced to a kind of being-object through the constituting power of the gaze. And yet, while this does important work in naming the violence of white racism, to what extent do the terms of this discourse reinscribe a subject-object ontology that various philosophical efforts have sought to overcome? After all, the racialized body is seen, but also sees itself being seen; it finds itself at the end of gaze but learns to see according to that gaze, to anticipate and negotiate it. Racialized embodiment entails a complex and concomitant being-subject-and-object. In this chapter, I turn to the resources of phenomenology, which with its emphasis on the lived body and its intercorporeal exposure prompts us to think more carefully through the experience of racial objectification as it emerges through the mechanism of the white gaze. Working through accounts of the body offered by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as well as through a more nuanced account of the experience of racialized embodiment, I argue that the ontological analysis of the racialized body-as-object requires some important fine-tuning and qualification. But this need not diminish the weight of claims regarding racial objectification; rather, it offers us the occasion to cast anew the ontological violence of racism: a violence not against one’s subjectivity as commonly argued, but a more …